Facing Ali

Casualties of a cruel sport. Broken spokes on boxing’s eternal wheel. Archetypes for the noble poor. Or, to cast such reductive generalizing aside, perhaps just men who made a choice. Facing Ali, which recounts the experience of stepping in with ‘The Greatest’ from the point of view of the boxers who did it,succeeds as an affecting documentary because it’s as much about those lesser known men who Muhammad Ali faced as it is about his own, exhaustively-documented life.

Each of the boxers profiled — from the famous (Frazier, Foreman, Norton, Holmes, Sir Henry Cooper), to the respected contenders (Shavers, Lyle, Chuvalo), to the more obscure (Ernie Terrell), to the unforgettable (Leon Spinks) — all defer to Ali’s legacy, but each is given the opportunity to tell his story. This makes the film’s narrative a rich composite of individuality, and all the more moving for the fact that Frazier, Norton, Lyle and Cooper, and now Muhammad Ali himself, have died since this film was first released. Ali is the touchstone that starts the discussion, but he doesn’t dominate the discourse so much as facilitate it through the recollections from his former adversaries.

Unless previously unknown facts emerge about Muhammad Ali‘s life, another documentary would be superfluous. His famous wins and losses, involvement with the Nation of Islam, opposition to the Vietnam War and subsequent imprisonment, have become cultural benchmarks in American history. Parkinson’s Syndrome robbed him of his wondrous verbal ability, which reduced most discussions of Ali to a juxtaposition between past glory with his later decline.

I’m no neuroscientist, but the latter is clearly indivisible from the former, as the film addresses at its conclusion (however unscientifically through the medicinal musings of Henry Cooper). But if Ali in his later years could not talk, at least his peers could speak authoritatively about him without descending into mawkish hagiography. They fought him, felt his blows, were stung by his tongue, and felt their personalities drown in his supernova.

Each man emerges as a fascinating subject on his own, having experienced, in almost every case, trouble or tragedy outside the ring. George Chuvalo lost three sons and his wife to drugs and suicide. Before he became a professional boxer Ron Lyle went to prison for second degree murder, where he was stabbed and pronounced dead twice on the operating table, requiring 36 pints of blood to remain alive. Earnie Shavers reveals that had he not boxed he would have become a professional killer, given the company he kept. (To underline, for a moment, the historical and sociological range of the experiences of these men, Shavers’ recalls an incident from his childhood in Alabama where a band of Klansman came looking for his father.) Similarly mired in difficult environments, Larry Holmes sold weed; Leon Spinks’ mother was on welfare; George Foreman was a young powder-keg of anger; Ken Norton was so poor that a hot dog was a feast for him and his son, and even Joe Frazier admits to car theft in New York before he settled in Philadelphia and committed himself to boxing.

Leon Spinks during the filming of Facing Ali.

Sir Henry Cooper, like Canada’s Chuvalo, is impressively in control of his faculties, and like the others he shadowboxes playfully for the camera. Thoughtful and genial, he retains a lucid memory and impressively clear speech, and tells an intriguing story about how he earned his date with Ali. He claims Ernie Terrell’s mob-linked manager, Bernie Glickman, went to Ali representative Herbert Muhammad and threatened him with death if Ali beat Terrell. According to the story, Herbert Muhammad had Glickman beaten, and Terrell’s fearful manager retreated into insanity, spending the rest of his life in an asylum. With Terrell’s chance gone for the time being, Chuvalo stepped in and lost a 15 round decision to Ali at Maple Leaf Gardens in 1966.

In less exemplary physical shape is Leon Spinks, who shocked the boxing world when he beat ‘The Greatest’ as a 25-year-old in 1978. In the aftermath of the unexpected victory, Spinks fell prey to the intoxicants of instant fame and lost the rematch. He speaks with an alarming impediment and lives in Nebraska where he does social work. “I was lost. I really was lost. I made a lot of wrong judgments,” he says, describing the tailspin he went into when his life accelerated after winning the title.

Joe Frazier in Facing Ali

A man whose speech is equally slurred, albeit for different reasons, is Ken Norton. He dragged himself out of the financial gutter with his upset of Ali in 1973, but in 1986 he was in a horrific car crash. In the film, Norton has no memory of the five years that followed his accident, three of which he spent paralyzed. Like Spinks, he is a man whose body has been beaten up by life, but he appears in decent spirits and gives a persuasive account of his career.

If this seems like merely an anecdotal recount of the movie, it’s because these memorable stories are what linger after watching Facing Ali. The testimonies bolster Ali’s impressive accomplishments and destabilize the idea of him as a man apart. He didn’t exist in insulated greatness but was fully immersed in his own era, arguably the strongest in heavyweight history, of which he proved himself the best.

None of Ali’s former opponents question his greatness.

It is important, however, and fair to the idea of boxing as a competition, that the sport isn’t seen through the prism of only one fighter. Trillions of brain cells have been lost, millions of minds made unconscious, and many bones broken in the purveyance of fighting as popular entertainment. The voices of those who’ve made these sacrifices deserve a stage upon which to tell their stories, both for their vindication and our enrichment.

“I’d go in the jungle and fight a lion with a toothpick,” Frazier says half-jokingly, as a way of reinforcing how impervious he was to Ali’s attempts to intimidate him. It’s a great line, the sort he probably couldn’t have delivered when under fire from Ali’s remorseless tongue during their trilogy. Tellingly, ‘The Greatest,’ who possessed the liveliest mouth of them all, couldn’t participate in Facing Ali because his gift of speech had long been snatched away. Such is the price, I suppose, of being the one others judge themselves against. –Eliott McCormick

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1 Comment

Frazier had an outstanding left hook , and was a tenacious competitor who attacked the body of his opponent ferociously. Despite suffering from a serious bout of hypertension in the lead-up to the fight, he appeared to be in top form as the face-off between the two undefeated champions approached.

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Montreal is The Fight City. Known in years past as "Sin City" and "Babylon on the St. Lawrence", it saw more than its share of ring legends over the decades. A metropolis where hundreds of young warriors train and battle each day in its many gyms, it is where Archie Moore, Sugar Ray Leonard, Roberto Duran and Bernard Hopkins all found greatness. It is a city of fights and fighters, of hockey and heroes, of broken dreams and immortal glory, a city unlike any other. Montreal is The Fight City.